Dear dimwit on the phone

Bridge scores? Really?

 

Just got off the phone with a guy who was in a lather over the time our weather graphic reported sunsets. He said they were 15 minutes too early.
I would understand if this thing was off by an hour, but 15 minutes? And this guy had to take the time to actually time the sunsets to figure out I was off by a few minutes. Dude it's called a life, I suggest you look into getting one.

 

The kicker would be if he lived in another town.

 

Sounds like my previous stop, where we'd routinely get letters wondering why we weren't printing the "real" temperatures (not to be confused with the real killers, of course). Let's see, we get the info from Accuweather, which uses temps from the official National Weather Service station in town. Reader's thermometer is from Wal-Mart and faces directly west ... of course theirs is more accurate!

 

I stopped printing the rainfall totals when I was interim managing editor because they would always be a day behind. The official measuring station for the town is the radio station, which is on auto pilot during the time we'd need the day's total (or, rather, the total at that point of the day, since our deadline was at 11 p.m.), so there wouldn't be anyone there to tell us what it was.

 

The last weekly I worked at ran shuffleboard roundups...I even forced my PTer to get me a a feature with main art one summer morning to kill space because they had some regional tournament going on that day.

He still hates me for that one! LOL

 

heh... That's the kind of shit I hate doing as a reporter, but oddly enough, I've found that people remember it the most.

 

In response to LGreenwel: And they are so nice when you're there. One of our papers is in a ritzy Vermont summer town, and I know the croquet people will be jazzed.

And people will read that stuff.

 

Henry: I know you are good at this business, but I gotta ask.

Assuming the track is local and there's reader interest. don't you have a schedule and possibly do previews?

I mean, of course the guy should have contacted you earlier for a major event, but was he on the fringes?

(And points to him for being nice. I hate the people who are unreasonable *and* rude).

 

To defend him to some extent - he might have known when qualifying or the heat races were going to start, but because each of those events can run different lengths depending on cautions, etc., it can be tough to give an exact time for when the feature race is going to push off. I've had that problem with sprint car races I've covered in the past in terms of giving the desk an idea of when it might end or the photographer a solid time when the A-main might start.

 

They called the day of, only giving him a few hours' notice. No way in hell is that getting in the next day's paper.

 

Only way it should is if you're planning on just leading with wire stuff because nothing else is going on. You do have to allow for some room for "breaking" news or things that happen that day.